Hmmm.... not altogether sure about this research (news article here
http://goo.gl/XZvMiv; peer-reviewed paper here http://goo.gl/RbrCyK).
It seems to be a rather rough-and-ready form of content analysis -- where you count
up the instances of different words or phrases to weigh up different themes. Content
analysis gets short shrift from sociolinguists, as a sort of training-wheels type of
discourse analysis. It's had a great deal more attention in health research though,
e.g. in coding qualitative interviews among HIV patients to establish patterns of
infection.
Anyway... the research above seems to want to say something about culture based on
variation and change in (written) language -- which is, like, our turf, right? Have
we been blind-sided or this just methodologically shabby fluff?
Dave
--
Dr. Dave Sayers
Honorary Research Fellow, Arts & Humanities, Swansea University, UK
Visiting Lecturer (2013-14), Dept English, University of Turku, Finland
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http://swansea.academia.edu/DaveSayers
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